For the hell of it, I thought I'd post this dramatic story that I've been working on for my Creative Writing class. I'm working on getting the two short film reviews done, so bear with me while I finally, mercifully, finish the brunt of my college workload (for now)."In the Tattoo Parlor"
Jack sits in the waiting room, the warm sunshine streaming through the colored windows onto his skin. He thinks that this must be what it will be like when gets his tattoo, a noticeable stain on his arm, as if his blood has somehow surfaced in dazzling colors.
The chair is hard and not cushioned, and he’s been waiting for almost a half an hour. He came early because he wasn’t sure where he was going, but now he regrets it; the parlor wasn’t open. Someone let him in anyway while they got the equipment ready for the new day.
To bide time, Jack examines the walls of the studio. Abstract art decorates almost every inch of the drab stucco. Getting up from the chair, he studies one with interest, as if looking at an optical illusion; perhaps if he looks long enough, an image will pop out at him. No image does, and so he moves on to the next one.
There are two skinny lines that intersect in the top right corner of the painting. Blotches of paint seem casually sprayed onto the canvas. He doesn’t feel anything from it, and stops trying to understand the art.
He spies a tribal mask hanging from a hook. It’s decorated with paint and feathers, the eyes cut into alien slits. It looks heavy; he wonders how anyone could wear it. He wonders if wearing it makes the person feel powerful, or embarrassed.
A glass cabinet filled with different body piercings lines the north side of the wall. Jack is surprised at the variety of ways to pierce the skin. He puts his elbow on the cabinet and leans against it, the cool glass supporting his body.
“Get off of that, you’ll break it,” a man with dark-rimmed glasses and an armful of tattoos says to him, entering the room with a stack of books. “That wouldn’t be good, blood everywhere, you know, and then someone would have to clean it up. Technically, we deal with wounds here, but not those kind.”
Jack pushes himself off of the counter. “I’m here for a tattoo.”
“I guessed it. You know, I had you pegged for a tattoo guy. Sure you don’t want a nose piercing? Got a special running on them today, two studs for the price of one, can’t beat that.”
“Just the tattoo, please.”
“You’re polite! Great to see someone who doesn’t storm in here talking shit about how psyched he is to show off his new tat to the hardcore kids.” The man sets his books on the stool and Jack gets a look at the covers – Tattooing for Dummies, A Guide to Piercing.
The man sees Jack’s leery look. “Oh, these. Yeah, brushing up on the basics. I’ve only done one or two tattoos before, so I’ve been studying hard.” He pauses, and Jack feels his stare. “I’m just kidding about that. I’ve done a million.”
The guy’s exactly who Jack pictured: beefy, with shaggy black waves of hair and a scruffy beard. He’s got tattoos of skulls, skeleton bones, topless demon women with hairy vaginas, flames. His shorts are pants that have been cut off at the knee, with strands of fabric hanging down his legs. The man’s also covered both of his legs with tattoos, making him a walking mural, an advertisement of his work. Jack thinks that the man would become a blur of color if he moved his limbs fast enough.
Jack spots one interesting tattoo on the man’s wrist. Foreign symbols wrap around in a circle; they look like a form of cursive. “What’s that mean?” Jack asks.
“The act of feeling.”
It was a good phrase. Perhaps Jack would get it written on his arm.
***
“What do you mean, getting a tattoo?” Jack’s mother questioned.
“Just what I said. I want one.”
“No. No, I don’t think so. You’re not old enough anyway.”
“I didn’t know there was an age limit. I just need your permission.”
“You don’t have it. Now help with dinner.” His mother was cutting carrots for their salad. Jack decided he hated salad.
He grabbed a bag of potatoes from under the kitchen cupboard, tore it open, and started peeling potatoes furiously.
“You’re peeling the good parts off too! Knock it off.”
Jack slowed down. He could hear his brother thumping around upstairs to dance music. The only Christmas present Jason had received this year was an old Devo CD found in the used bin of a department store, but he still loved it for what it was. Jack was particularly sick of hearing it this far into January.
“Tell him to turn that down, Mom.”
“He’s fine. Why do you want a tattoo so badly?”
“I don’t know. They’re cool.”
“What did you want it to be?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to know.”
“I don’t know.”
He knew then he wasn’t getting one, at least not with his mom’s permission. His mom pestered him because she thought he was hiding an answer. But he’d only ever lied to his mother once, when he’d stolen her car late that night last July.
He had no idea what the drive was for the tattoo. It wasn’t to impress girls in his class.
“It’s not to impress girls, is it?”
“I don’t know.”
His mother went back to peeling her carrots diligently; Jason continued stomping on the floor, threatening to send showers of ceiling powder down on the food they were preparing; Jack continued to peel the potatoes the best he knew how. They didn’t discuss the tattoo any further, not when the sun went down and Jack’s father didn’t come home for the second night in a row and his mother locked herself in the bathroom for a two-hour “bath” and Jack slipped out of the house unnoticed.
***
“Are you ready?”
“For what?”
“Your tattoo. The beginning of your life as a new man. What’s your name, anyway?”
Jack tells him. He wonders what it will be like to be a new man, to be a man at all. He thinks that he’s barely started his life.
“I’m Kevin. It’s nice to meet you.” Kevin taps his arm, where a skull tattoo blends into a colorful image of a baby. “Every tattoo changes you.”
Jack doesn’t know what this means. A tattoo is a tattoo, he thinks. There should be no philosophy behind it. It’s just a picture on skin, a fairly new medium of art. “I bet,” he responds, because he does not know what to say.
Kevin’s eyes meet Jack’s. “How old are you?” Kevin’s blue eyes shine, and Jack pretends to see himself in them. Jack tells himself there’s no deep connection hidden within their stares, the strands of their consciousness do not intertwine, they do not know each other, they will not know each other. Kevin is just the tattoo-er, Jack the tattoo-ee, and there will never be a connection deeper than the needles that pierce his skin.
“Nineteen.”
“You’re physically old enough, then.”
Jack speaks his assent. “Why?”
“It doesn’t matter. Where’s the thing going?”
“Forearm.”
“Noticeable, then.”
Jack feels Kevin’s probing questions in his gut. Is it standard procedure to question the costumer? He hopes not. He desperately wants Kevin to ask the reason for the tattoo.
The sunlight dances in and out of the window as clouds move across it. Customers have yet to cross through the doorway. Time is carrying on, Jack realizes. It is almost time for the big event. He swears the abstract art flickers and moves in the corner of his eye.
***
“You’re drunk.”
“You’re not.”
Jack sat in the living room of Jess’ ramshackle house. The springs of the couch were cutting into his ass and the stuffing was clinging to his clothes like bubbles in a bath. Smoke wafted through the air, giving everything a haze that Jack enjoyed looking through. The whole world seemed coated in such fog. The ends of their cigarettes were the only lights in the room, and Jack could only be sure of Jess’ position because of the embers.
Other than those opening words, they had sat in silence after Jess had let Jack into the house. He had pounded on her door hard enough to get the next door neighbor’s dog barking, but no lights had gone on in Jess’ house. There was no one to turn them on but Jess, and she liked to live in the dark these days.
Jess put her cigarette out on the couch and Jack lost sight of her. “It’s warm.”
“Cold for July.” Jack put his stub out too, in the ashtray on the three-legged coffee table.
“Maybe. What do you want?”
“My dad didn’t come home again.”
“Neither did mine.” Jack felt the weight on the cushion shift and knew Jess had stood up.
“It’s different.”
“Yeah.”
Jack didn’t know what to say. “How’s he been?”
“Okay.”
Jack could now see an outline of her in the moonlit window. Her head was scrunched forward, staring avidly into the sky. “What does okay stand for? Is that some sort of code?”
“I don’t know.”
“Haven’t you visited him lately?”
“Yeah, I have. He looks the same as always – dying.” There was no sharp tone to her voice, only truth, as if she’d said it aloud to herself in rehearsal many times before.
“Did they tell you he’s dying?”
“They don’t tell me anything.”
“Do you ask?”
Jess raised her arm to her forehead. She looked like she was posing for a magazine, but the only ones Jack could think of were sad ones. “I don’t have to. He’s all shriveled and dehydrated. He can barely see me. Sometimes I wish I were just an orderly visiting him.”
She stopped but Jack knew she wasn’t finished. He let her go on.
“I wish I didn’t know him. I wish we weren’t family. I pretend I’m just a worker at the hospital and when he dies, I’ll just have to clean the sheets and work on the next patient.”
The stairs creaked, the crickets chirped outside. The night was a roller coaster. Jess was lost in moonlight, Jack in the darkness of the living room, and they both didn’t have a father. Maybe that was the only reason they stayed with each other.
“You’re drunk, Jess. Go to bed. I’ll let myself out.”
“I know. Okay. Okay.”
Jack hadn’t forgotten about what he wanted to talk to Jess about. But there was never any room for his thoughts when Jess’ were forever with her father. That made two of them.
***
“I just need you to fill out some paperwork,” Kevin says, passing Jack a sheet of paper.
Jack studies it. There are words like “cautionary,” “risks,” “lawsuit,” and other forms of legalese that Jack knows nothing about. “What’s it for?”
“It’s just to protect against anything that we could possibly be sued for. You know, legal issues. You’ve heard about people suing because their coffee was too hot, right? Same deal.”
Jack signs it, trusting in Kevin’s skill and the establishment itself. He knows the horror stories.
“Thanks, man. We’ll take you into the back room and get you all set up. Wait here.” Kevin moves from behind the counter and disappears into the back of the parlor.
Jack waits. A couple comes in: a blonde, dreadlocked woman with a bull nose ring and a bald-headed man with tattoos covering most of his scalp. Jack smiles, but they turn away from him and skulk in the corner.
He imagines this man is his dad. Kevin had said that tattoos change a person; maybe they also make them look younger, leaner, and more threatening. He knows it’s not possible, because the bald-headed man is much too short to be his father. The guy’s legs are too stubby and his knees have taken on a swelling that resembles Osgood-Schlatter disease, a problem Jason had been diagnosed with a few years ago.
Jack wonders where his father could be. He can’t make a proper identification of the bald man without seeing the rest of his tattoos.
***
“Where’s Dad?” Jack asked his mother in a wavery voice. He was freezing. His mother did not have enough money to pay for oil for the furnace this month, and they had to wrap themselves in wool blankets in the coldest part of February before the winter weather snaps to usher in March. Before, he had been able to see the yellowed grass and the leaves they didn’t have time to rake, but the snow had fallen again in great big tufts like bubbles and covered every hope of spring. They were left to wait out the winter as bears do, except without the gratification of hibernation.
“Who knows.” She lit a cigarette.
“Where did you get those?”
“Your coat pocket.”
“You don’t smoke.”
“I know.”
He paused for a moment, thinking she would say more. When nothing came, he said, “If you’re going to, can I have one?”
“They’re yours.” She offered the pack. Jack took two, one for now and one for later if his mother decided to smoke them all.
“So you knew I smoked?”
“I didn’t until I started looking.”
They sat speechless for a while, watching the snow squall outside with their glowing cigarettes. The quiet was unbearable. The worst part of the winter was the noise of silence.
“Why does he go? Why won’t he stay?”
These were questions he knew she couldn’t answer. And why did he ask them? To hurt her. As if everything was her fault. Jack could even blame the house, with its caved-in walls and the hole behind the refrigerator which was kicked in by Jess in a drunken rage. Maybe it was the washer that did it, the final straw, when it broke down on him doing the laundry. Maybe his father was forever washing his clothes in an apartment building.
She didn’t answer, just blew her smoke into the air and sighed. “Have I told you a story about your father?”
“I don’t know.” The wind rattled the windows and his mother pulled her bulky sweater closer to her.
“We had been dating for a while. It was summer, and we were bored. Your father was working as a gas station clerk while I spent most of the days working on your grandfather’s garden.”
“The dead one?”
“It wasn’t dead then.” She took a puff and then put the cigarette out. “Your grandfather would kill me if he saw me smoking with you. Anyway, we decided to take a vacation. Your father wanted to get out of his job anyway, so when the boss wouldn’t give him time off, he quit and spit in the guy’s face. He could never find a gas job again, that’s for sure.
“I can’t even remember where we went. Most of the trip was us driving, us fighting, and us making up in the hotel room.”
“Mom.”
“Yeah. But we did have one experience I’ll never forget. It was stupid and my idea. I said we should get matching tattoos. And we did, too, right on our shoulders.” His mother pulled her sweater sleeve up, revealing a bee tattoo that resembled less the insect than a wrinkled green grape. She snickered sarcastically. “A clichéd way to show we’d always be together, like the fucking movies.”
Jack had never seen his mother this way but knew the emotions running through his mother were similar to Jess at her worst. He let her finish.
“Now look at it. It barely looks like a bee. Did you know? Your father tried to have his removed so when he fucks his whores, he can’t feel as guilty. This is old age, Jack.”
“You’re not that old, Mom. Things can change. Things will change.”
“Look at it.” She fingered her tattoo. “This is old age. This has become the sign that everything I worked so hard for in my life can be summed up as the best and worst part of my life. And now you know why I don’t want you to get your tattoo. You’re young enough where you don’t realize that what you felt so sure of before will change; there will be nothing but a scar to remind you of the mistake.”
***
Everything seems louder in the tattoo room. Jack hears the wrappers on the needles being stripped off; he imagines the sound as teeth ripping skin.
The air smells clean and sterile. The walls are white and uncovered; it is so much starker than the waiting room that Jack feels blinded.
Kevin looks at him. “Heightened sensory perception. It happens to a lot of people right before or right after.”
“Uncomfortable.”
“Hm.” Kevin is no more interested in Jack than any other patient. He is too busy readying equipment for the tattoo.
***
In May, Jack’s father had still not come home, and Jess found that hers could never come home again. The buds had started to bloom into fine young flowers, the bees had begun to harvest their honey, and death seemed too far off to be real for either of them.
“What is it like?”
“What is what like?”
“Your father being gone.”
“I’ve gotten used to it.”
“I mean, what is it like to know that he’s still alive and just not in your life?”
Jack was again at a loss for words. He realized that the passing of Jess’ father was probably the end of their relationship together and still couldn’t pull words from his tongue.
“I mean, can it ever really feel the same? As death, I mean?”
“Probably not. Are you asking me which is shittier?”
“Sort of.” Jess lit a cigarette and offered one to Jack, who declined. “Because this feels pretty goddam shitty.”
“I don’t know. My father isn’t dead.”
“Maybe that’s the worst then, right? Knowing he’s alive and that you could be with him if he didn’t hate you so much?” She started sobbing, and Jack held her with one arm, the other balled into a fist.
When Jess got into her dad’s beat-up Sedan – now her Sedan – Jack waved to her for the last time. She had done nothing for him. The connection that they had made was linked to Jess’ father, not his, and now that it was broken, there was nothing Jess could do. She had her own mourning to deal with.
She hadn’t meant what she said, but he couldn’t help but picture her father shriveled and lifeless. Then it was his father. They were the same, in the end – death and abandonment. It was just that in one, you had a choice.
***
“Who are we?” Jack asks. He is sitting in a cushioned reclining chair that has just been wiped down with lemon-scented disinfectant. Kevin is standing over him, almost ready to begin the procedure.
“Man, that’s a pretty philosophical question to be asking a lowly tattoo artist.”
“Yeah.”
“We are who we think we are. The funny part of everything is that our society tries to stop us from recognizing who we are; we constantly have to change our individuality to fit with someone else. By the time we figure out who we are, we aren’t that person anymore. It’s who we were.” Kevin pauses. “That’s my take on it, anyway. What’s yours?”
Jack leans back in the chair. It seems as though he has shared a personal moment with Kevin, one that has passed in the space of here and now and never again. He reciprocates the sentiment: “The same.”
Kevin’s expression drops, noticeably in his mouth, where little wrinkles form at the corners. Jack recognizes these tells, just as an expert poker player reads a bluff. It was his last chance to elevate this chance encounter above mere customer service, and he has failed.
He supposes it’s time to get it over with, then.
“Why a bee tattoo?” Kevin asks conversationally, like small-talk in a hair salon, as he presses the tattoo gun to Jack’s skin. But Jack is no longer listening; he is lost in a connection of his mind, wandering from person to person, the bird in the children’s book Are You my Mother.
The needles press into his skin, beginning their outline of the bee that will forever mar his skin. There is no pain; he barely recognizes that it is his arm that is being mined for blood. He pretends it is a temporary tattoo, one he can smear and smudge after a hot shower. As he looks down, he sees his mother’s arm, his father’s; he sees Jess’ father’s withered arm, even though it is only real in his mind, and wonders if they could have been friends, shared bonding moments; he sees the bee tattoo the same as if he was noticing a single blade of grass.
It is a scar; it is a compass, the North Star. It means nothing. It means everything.
